Mueller, the Sanders Tax, Rand and Revolution...

Today's political posting can't compete with the Mueller hearings, which established clearly that RM would have indicted Two Scoops for obstruction, had he not been shielded by the dubious OLC memo on presidential immunity. (Note when we get Congress back from Putin, we can amend that, carefully. I favor the concept of "slow indictment." Criminal and other proceedings against a sitting president may move forward so long as they demand from him or her - in total - no more than say ten hours a week of distraction/attention from other duties.) 

What I wanted from Mueller was a very clear description of "criminal conspiracy" as primly defined in a free society that gives all benefit of the doubt to the accused. If that benefit were less strong, would "preponderance of the evidence" have led Mueller to indict on that charge, as well? In the dictionary definition of "collusion," which is not a legal one at all, would he conclude that the Trumpists colluded with Moscow, even if criminal conspiracy wasn't proved? The answer in both cases would be resounding yes.

So much for that, for today. This posting features a few interesting items...

== Bernie goes to a matter of importance! ==

Sen. Bernie Sanders has introduced a bill that would tax trading of stocks, bonds and derivatives at rates ranging from 0.005% to 0.5%. "A so-called financial transactions tax could raise between $776 billion and $2.4 trillion over 10 years, economists estimate.The U.S. hasn't taxed financial trades since the 1960s, although the 2008 financial crash brought the idea back in vogue.”

Sanders noted that Great Britain has levied such a tax since the late 17th century, while dozens of other countries also use one. In more recent years, France started taxing trades in 2012, and a wider tax went into effect in the European Union in 2017.

“Research suggests a transaction tax would have the greatest impact on hedge funds and other speculators, which make hundreds or thousands of trades a second, profiting from faster technology or advance information. … While each trade might yield only a fraction of a cent in profit, the sheer volume of trades make it lucrative. Nearly half the volume on a given day is made up of this type of speculative activity.”

“A Forbes contributor likened it to a cigarette tax: "It would pick up some revenue while discouraging dangerous activity.”

Oh, but it is much, much more important than that.  See where - almost a decade ago - I proposed this as a way to save us from rogue AI! 
“A Transaction Fee Might Save CapitalMarkets... and Protect Us From The Terminator!”

== Adam Smith knew it ==

Many of you I know I deem Evonomics to be an important site for moderate liberal thinkers to reclaim the legacy of Adam Smith, who (along with the American Founders) knew that oligarchy by cheater-lords has always been to main enemy of flat-fair-competitive-creative enterprise and markets. 
    
This article - Eight Reasons Why Inequality Ruins the Economy - lists 8 possible theories for why slower growth correlates with widening wealth disparities. In other words, cheater lords once again poisoning the very markets they depend on and sowing seeds of revolution.
    
All eight correlations likely have some validity, though I believe #1 is both inarguable and paramount.

== Combat your enemy, not a strawman, or straw – Rand ==

On the Evonomics site, true market liberalism – Smith's flat-fair-competitive enterprise – finds its actual champions. It finds them where they have always been, especially during the Greatest Generation -- slightly left of center. 

Still, sometimes an intelligent writer misses the point. Sorry, but this take-down of Ayn Rand, while cogent in many places, utterly fails to grasp her main weaknesses. I'll try to summarize. From Locke and Adam Smith to the U.S. Founders, "liberal" society sought a middle ground between competition and cooperation. 

Competition is the greatest creative force of all - and libertarianism is founded on that true fact, then drifts and loses its way by ignoring one pure fact we see across the last 4000 years: that competition is spoiled by cheaters!  And history shows that human males (lords/kings/owners/priests) will cheat with any excuse. The commissars who Ayn Rand saw in her youth weren't "altruists" at all, but were simply the latest wave of male cheaters, using Marxist cant to give themselves a slightly different-colored version of rapacious feudal power. 

Rand and her followers extoll the creative power of competition - which empowered liberal societies to vast wealth and fecundity - while frenetically ignoring the element that made it possible, keeping our competitive arenas -- markets, democracy, science and courts -- flat and fair.

The conditions for fecund COMPETITION require social and democratic COOPERATION, in order to provide healthy markets with two essentials: anti-cheating regulation and maximization of opportunity for new competitors. 

(Liberal programs to uplift poor children require no justification on moral grounds! They are how we maximize our input-feedstock of skilled and confident competitors and prevent the recurring failure mode of oligarchy. Libertarians who oppose such programs are thus utter hypocrites.)

Rand portrays ubermensch heroes prevailing via impudent genius and creativity over the opposition of entrenched cheaters... whereupon she then ignores what has always happened next, until our liberal revolutions. The new lords just replicate the pattern, use their wealth to suppress new competitors, and cheat to give their sons unfair advantage. 

Actually, she knew this! It's why, across thousands of pages of Randism, only on one single page does she ever mention children, reproduction, new generations. Because if her New Lords procreate, the reader will start to ponder what's next, and recognize that she solved nothing.

Hence, alas, while Dr. Cummins says many wise things in her Evonomics take-down, she is not arguing directly with Randians or going to their core weakness. For more in this in detail, see:  http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/aynrand.html

== Signs of revolution ==

The pool of smaller, affordable starter houses is low. And increasingly, first-time homebuyers are competing with investors who are buying up these homes. 

Look up the British "enclosures crisis" and similar events in Rome etc, and other ways the rentier caste cheated to rob the middle. This trend proves one thing above all else. That aristocracy does not equate to intelligence. The smart zillionaires... Buffett, Gates, Bezos etc ... can see where this leads. They cry: "raise my taxes!" not just for moral reasons, but to keep tumbrels from coming after them.

Not all aristocrats have foresight. An infographic on how some of today’s rich are seeking bolt-holes or Patagonian ranchos or other survivalist means to survive an apocalypse of their own making. And – um – they think that the smart people they’ve been waging war against don’t know where all of these “refuges” are located? 

You actually think that all the folks who know stuff and how to make and use stuff won’t be able to find you?

== A related aside... ==

Take a peek at the ideas of Douglas Rushkoff, whose new book Team Human is about ways that we might restore our shared sense of forward purpose, dissecting some very old, false ideas about competition, individuality, scarcity, and progress. “We needn’t embed these values in the digital landscape of tomorrow.” Elsewhere, Rushkoff described how some of the business elite are going about preparing for a doomsday, Salon ran an article: “We asked psychologists why so many rich people think the apocalypse is coming.”

Among the insights: “Though we tend to think of the apocalypse as negative, the idea may counterintuitively be attractive to some,” he said. “In a world in which life feels uncertain and often unfair, in which people struggle to find a sense of personal purpose, the idea of an apocalyptic ending, though terrifying, can also feel meaningful." ... "This is obvious when we think about certain religious apocalyptic beliefs, but even among more secular types or those who do not believe in a particular religious apocalyptic narrative, apocalyptic ideas can be seductive... like people dreaming of a “better world."

... “Some are attracted to these ideas because they would be tested and could find their true purpose, maybe even emerge as heroes or people of importance in a new world,” he said... “And some like to imagine the possibility of a simpler life, what might be almost a form of nostalgia.”  

Of course, this is one of the malignant, cancerous mind-memes that I addressed, at some depth” in The Postman, and later in Existence.

== Spread this concept == 

Again,  consider ways to get someone, anyone in power to look at my gerrymandering solution, one that takes three sentences, is simple, does not impose a commission or complex formula, and would give a big sop to Chief Justice John Roberts's rationalization -- his need to allow legislative sovereignty. Yes, a state legislature's sovereign right to cheat its own citizens. 

Alas, I had no way to tunnel it into the sincere and hardworking but microcephalic heads of the plaintiff lawyers in this case.

The True Founder of our Revolution - Summing up.

If I seem repetitive, it's because some crucial points keep not being made, in the fight over where to steer civilization. 

Sure, moral issues -- like a narcissistic toddler who steals thousands of children -- belong front and center. But they cannot be the only battle front. Because confederates have been schooled to shrug aside moral arguments.

"While sappy-socialist liberals preach, we are the pragmatic competitors who innovate and invest and make America rich!"  By styling themselves as defenders of enterprise and creative markets, oligarchs offer a rhetoric that attracts populist fervor from hardworking farmers and auto mechanics, who know that life is -- and at some level should be -- highly competitive. 

By ceding this ground to the New Lords, liberals make their worst mistake. Because liberalism is justifiable in practical terms! In the health of creative markets. In terms of measurable outcomes. In the general, rising good of all. And especially in keeping faith with the Great Experiment of Freedom...

... and one of its principal founders: Adam Smith.

== A Great Rediscovery ==

The Financial Times (U.K.) is so vastly better than any of its largely lobotomized (or else oligarchy-suborned) U.S. equivalents. A recently published essay - How Adam Smith would fix capitalism - summons what I’ve pushed for years — a rediscovery of this co-founder — along with Franklin and those Americans — of our great, Periclean experiment. Writer Jesse Norman (a British Member of Parliament) gets Smith, showing that the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments was a deeply caring man, who wanted a balanced use of market forces to benefit everyone, truly raising all boats. 

Yes, Smith extolled the unmatched creative power of competition. But the author of The Wealth of Nations, gazed across 6000 years of wretched history and drew a clear conclusion — that humans who gain undue power tend to use it to cheat. To warp markets until they no longer function. 

We forget that the actual Boston Tea Party, and the American Revolution, were against a king and his crony oligarchs who commanded that all commerce pass through their docks, paying extortion to lordly monopolists on everything from paper to porcelain, rents that they never earned. The very cheating Adam Smith denounced… and the very opposite lesson of today’s raving “tea-party” confederates.

Those betraying Smith are the ones who most-often claim to extol him, yet do everything in their power to enhance cheating by today’s oligarchs. Says Jesse Norman: 

“…what matters is not the largely empty rhetoric of “free markets”, but the reality of effective competition. And effective competition requires mechanisms that force companies to internalise their own costs and not push them on to others, that bear down on crony capitalism, rent extraction, “insider” vs “outsider” asymmetries of information and power, and political lobbying.”

To Norman’s list, I would add two more vital ways that liberal “market meddling” is highly justifiable in Smithian terms:

1. Adjusting market forces to incorporate “externalities” like the good of our posterity, our grandchildren and the ecosystem they’ll depend upon. Adam Smith wrote repeatedly that a society’s values can legitimately be emphasized, so long as the resulting strictures (e.g. tobacco or carbon taxes) are simple, fair, consistent and not another excuse for cheating. 

2. Stop wasting talent. A nation that chooses to maximize the feedstock of confident, skilled, joyfully ready competitors is one that will maximize the effectiveness of markets. And hence it is a society that invests in children, in education and health and civil rights, maximizing opportunity without meddling overmuch in equalizing outcomes.  Even the doyen of conservative (not-fascist) economics -- Friedrich Hayek -- conceded this point.

Norman makes clear that this is a matter of survival for any system that seeks the immense benefits of flat-fair-open market accountability: 
     “This is a complex and nuanced message, as befits our ever more complex world. It is threatening enough to current orthodoxies that many on all sides, libertarian and socialist, will resist it. Properly understood, however, these Smithian ideas remain absolutely fundamental to any attempt to defend, reform or renew the market system.”

Now, for a shocker that should not surprise. Jesse Norman is the Conservative Party MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire, and the author of a biography of Edmund Burke: The First Conservative.  And clearly, the word “conservative” has an older, better meaning, over there. He has a new book out in September: Adam Smith: Father of Economics.

== The rediscovery continues ==

Evonomics is back on high octane. Jonathan Haidt begins a series called 'Darwin's business' that starts by appraising the CEO of Sears, whose management approach - modeled on Ayn Rand - has taken an American giant and corporate icon to the verge of utter collapse. Also, Peter Turchin asks whether morality can apply to capitalism. 

Ironies abound. For example, Sears earlier (1992) abandoned its 140 year old mail order business at the very moment the first online stores set up on the Web. Can you believe that coincidence? Sears had been poised to own it all... to be Amazon-squared... and threw it all away! 

But the deeper irony in these two articles is simpler. It is only on a liberal site like Evonomics that you find bright folks talking seriously about Adam Smith, and whether it might be possible to rescue market competitive enterprise from its worst enemies across 6000 years...

...not 'socialists,' but cheaters and shortsighted fools.

Alas, liberals are supposed to be the smart ones, on this side of the Atlantic. But you’ll not find one in a hundred who know that their entire movement had a few fathers other than ol’ Ben Franklin and that crew.  And number one on that list was Adam Smith. Reclaim him.

== The roots of the Confederate Counter-Attack ==

I’ve somewhat famously - or infamously - called our present predicament “Phase 8” of an American Civil war that has recurred since 1778, when General Cornwallis knew he would find more romantics loyal to King and Lords, down south. Later, the plantation/slave-owning caste filled the top niche that all-too easily plunges into cheating, while crushing fair competition - the same corrupt modality that Adam Smith denounced.

What about the “Greatest Generation” (GG) that overcame the First Depression, smashed Hitler, contained communism, built American science, got us to the moon, and crafted the greatest middle class in history? Is that “when America was great?" (Ask that question incessantly!)

You mean back then the GG's favorite living human was FDR? In that era of strong unions and spectacular economic growth — when the great push to reform our racial and gender and other blindnesses began? When we achieved a social structure (for white males at first, but then others) flatter than any ever known.  Markets were regulated to keep competition flat, and the results were inarguable.

Except there were a few arguing for a return older ways. Based upon a core germ of truth — that government regulation can sometimes become cloying or stifling -- they began a cult that grew to declare evil any and all regulation to keep competition flat or fair…  a cult filled with incantations of loathing against the Greatest Generation’s methods for controlling cheating.

I’ve spoken of Milton Friedman, whose incantations led to the shrinking of corporate ROI (Return on Investment) horizons from ten years to today’s ten weeks. But in a truly scary article, Lynn Parramore describes historian Nancy MacLean’s book - Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America - about Nobel laureate James Buchanan, “who is the intellectual linchpin of the Koch-funded attack on democratic institutions.” 

In works like Property as a Guarantor of Liberty (1993).  Buchanan saw society as a cutthroat realm of makers (entrepreneurs) constantly under siege by takers (everybody else) His own language was often more stark, warning the alleged “prey” of “parasites” and “predators” out to fleece them.

Never mind that feudalism -- (rule by the owner caste) -- had 6000 years to prove its case, and exactly zero examples of good governance. What Buchanan illustrates is the way that aristocrats and their paid priests have suborned our natural, libertarian instincts, so that today hardly any libertarians ever even mention Smith’s core notion of flat-fair competition -- the "C-Word" -- anymore, parroting instead Buchanan’s (and Pharaoh’s) worship of the word, “property.”

“Adam Smith saw human beings as self-interested and hungry for personal power and material comfort, but he also acknowledged social instincts like compassion and fairness. Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people were primarily driven by venal self-interest.”

If you have time, look at this essay and realize how long we have been complacent about this counter-attack by the old enemy of human freedom and creativity and happiness, a cabal of zero-sum fools who will win nothing, if they succeed in this oligarchic putsch.

Nothing but a ride in tumbrels.

 == Aaaaand... more about... Adam Smith...

I wrote a lot about this fellow, who liberals should rediscover and embrace, in order to free him from the right wingers and libertarians who always, always misquote and betray him.  Well, since OpenSalon dumped my work, let me offer a few quotations here, and a link to Blogging Adam Smith. Or actually read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, a book that any politically-minded person should know, top to bottom. (See where I tie in Adam Smith with Hari Seldon and Isaac Asimov!) 

Start with what could be a slogan for liberalism.

“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” 

The whole tenor of this next passage would, or should, outrage any Ayn Rand cultist. Smith certainly didn’t take the view that the important agents of capitalism were CEOs or even inventors.

“Observe the accommodation of the most common artificer or day-labourer in a civilized and thriving country, and you will perceive that the number of people whose industry a part, though a small part, has been employed in procuring him this accommodation, exceeds all computation.”

Then there is the natural trend, described by Marx, for industries to drift into monopoly or conspiratorial duopoly, a trend that our parents and grandparents wisely fought down under both Roosevelts.

“The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked... sell their commodities much above the natural price... The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got. The natural price, or the price of free competition, on the contrary, is the lowest which can be taken....”

And another passage skipped over by the libertarians: “We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters [cartels]; though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour....” 

Modern context? See how Robert Reich explains the “Monopolization of America.” And be outraged that the Boomers let slide the wisdom of their parents and grandparents who adored Roosevelts for good reasons. (And why can't we find one?)

== Choose a side, libertarians ==

Finally, what all of this comes down to is a tactic for this civil war. Again and again I will remind you it is worthwhile ministering to libertarians! 

They share with you a central reflex -- Suspicion of Authority (SoA) -- though clever oligarchs have spent gushers to divert the movement away from ever casting that suspicious eye on them! 

Cozened into defending property at all cost, and forgetting the word competition, most of the libertarian movement is currently under complete control by those who bought and paid for it – Steve Forbes, the Kochs, and the lords’ wholly-owned propaganda arm, the Cato Institute.

It’s a pity! Libertarians – were they to learn from their endless failures at both election and prediction – might become a real force on the landscape of both ideas and political reform.  No one is asking them to stop questioning Big Government!  But to recognize a core historical fact:  that monopoly and feudal oligarchies have destroyed more glimmering eras of freedom and market creativity than all the government bureaucrats who ever lived.

Minister to them! They share so many of your basic, impudent, pro-freedom instincts. (See this FB group for "Cyber-Libertarian Democrats.") Tell your libertarian friends: 

"Stop letting the worst enemies of freedom bribe you into only hating on a secondary foe! The original American Revolution was not hatred of “government,” but a king and his cronies who used a gerrymandered Parliament to pass laws favoring the owner-lord aristocracy, forcing all American commerce through their ports and wharves, buying from their monopolies. Do fight to keep the hand of government regulation light! But also fight to keep the hands of oligarchy off of our republic."

Cite a fellow who no libertarian ever reads anymore, so much wiser and smarter and more effective than Ayn bloody Rand that they aren’t arguably the same species.

Economic Inequality: opportunity vs outcomes

Our last posting -- extensively  shared by thousands -- offered long, verbatim quotations from epic science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, revealing his amazing prophecy of an America falling into perilous failure mode.  

Now let's back off from our immediate crisis and try some perspective.

== The Equality Problem ==

This article - Is Inequality Inevitable? — asks a fair enough question, whose answer is “Sure, inequality is inevitable. So?” 

That don’t mean we can't always make things better.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry starts with studies showing that the children of elites have always stood a better chance of becoming elite, themselves, and that efforts to equalize outcomes by force - such as Maoist cultural revolution - always fail. Indeed, in Europe, the same surnames have been elite for 400 years.

True enough.  Only then M. Gagny calls all liberal efforts at mitigation futile and useless -- an assertion that amounts to stark-jibbering toilet raving.

One refutation is to point out the staggering amounts of cheating and repression that inherited oligarchies and other elites have engaged in, across all eras, to ensure advantages for their offspring. Nearly all of recorded human history reveals the lengths that lords and masters went to, using law and religion and sheer economic bullying to prevent sons or daughters of the poor from competing fairly with their own children. 

If aristocracy were self-replicating on the basis of simple, inherited quality, why then the relentless frenzy of desperate repression that we see across all annals, in all nations and eras?

Further, if inherited lordship were a matter of genuine superiority, then why - across the long epochs before our egalitarian experiment - were nearly all kingdoms and oligarchies so delusional and so horrifically-governed?  There is a name for the cosmically stupid way that 99% of post agricultural societies were governed. In a general sense, that name is feudalism. Another word for the endless litany of insipid and lethal errors committed by aristocrats is -- history.

Or, in more modern parlance: Idiocracy.

In my novel, Existence, I portray a meeting of uber-trillionaires in 2048. They can see they are going to win, that their putsch against liberal democracy is about to succeed, and looming success has them worried.  They can also see that feudalism is vastly less productive, innovative and far more error prone than open systems like transparent republics. Is there a way out of this dilemma?

At their conference, they earnestly seek ways to imbue the rule of inherited oligarchy with meritocratic and competitive elements, weaving in some of the powerful synergies of the Enlightenment... without its egalitarianism.  Kind of like what the Chinese ruling caste has been desperately trying to achieve, for decades. There are inherent flaws to this plan. But at least these oligarchs are smart enough to see the alternative:

Paris: 1789. And tumbrels.

(See my earlier posting: Class War and the Lessons of History. Oh and ponder this: why have Google searches on the words "Karl" and "Marx" been skyrocketing of late?)

== Easing our way out of a lethal attractor state ==

Sure, our egalitarianism has been flawed, often corrupted and always imperfect. Yet, our ongoing enlightenment experiment does correlate with a singular society that has been vastly more creative, productive, fair, scientific and happier than all others… and yes I mean absolutely all of them… combined.

If the grandchildren of rich people do tend to be rich, and the kids of scientists may somewhat tend to replicate that success, then liberal-minded folk will cite favorable circumstance as a chief reason. Nurture over nature. And so far, that presumption seems more right than wrong. 

But even if there is also a strong, genetic component, we still seem well-served by at least addressing those unfair inequalities that do cause disparities. And make each generation of favored kids work to prove it. To earn what they achieve.

We must do this for one reason, above all others — in order to stop wasting human talent.  Expanding opportunity for the children of the poor, of all races, genders etc., is simply logical and a vast improvement over the institutionalized, reflexive and wasteful bigotries of the past. 

Any excuse-making in the opposite direction is not only morally vile, it is also deeply impractical! Because it rationalizes reducing the number of skilled, eager, confident and competent competitors to enter our markets.  In other words, those who rationalize inequality of opportunity for children and youths are betraying the very essence of Adam Smith, of Friedrich Hayek and all other icons of competitive enterprise.

Hypocrisy -- by their own standards.

And sure, yes, inequality (for children and youths) is also immoral. But notice that some people find it easier to shrug off that appeal, than when you base your argument on the practical benefits of equalization. Remember -- oh remember -- that the American founders seized up to a third of the lad in the former colonies from elite-lordly families and redistributed it! An act of "leveling that made FDR look tame. And they did it for pragmatic reasons. In order to keep the revolution one of a calm, middle class, not a rabid mob.

Why emphasize children and youths?

Elsewhere I explain in detail the difference between interventions that aim to equalize opportunity and those that aim at equality of outcomes. Foolish  reactionaries like M. Gagny seem to agree with radical levelers on the other side, that liberal interventions aim at outcome-equalization. Indeed, if that were the case, perhaps I could see a point to the ravings of the far-right and the far-left. 

If that were the aim, then call me a rebel-libertarian.

But that vile, lobotomizing “left-right axis” is built upon shavings of stupidity. In fact, I assert: if state actions concentrate only on raising up possible opportunities for children of the poor, then outcomes will manage themselves. Contra-wise, those who slash investments in the children of the poor aren't just evil people, they are traitors to our revolution.

== The context for it all: The Fermi Paradox ==

Many of you know that I am the principal tabulator of hypotheses and proposed explanations for why we seem to be alone in the cosmos -- the Great Silence... also called The Fermi Paradox.  Of the hundred or so theories that have been offered, I rank a Top Ten.  And high on my list is...

... feudalism.  The chief attractor state of human governance, sucking in 99% of all human societies that ever got metals.  Feudalism rewards big males who act like elephant seals and bash other males to take their women and wheat.  We are all descended from the harems of guys who pulled that off.  

Moreover, the Darwinian logic probably applies on other worlds, perhaps most other worlds. And if so, we get a powerful "fermi" hypothesis: that all over the galaxy kings and feudal lords and priests suppress science and advancement and environmental care, because they are focused on short term battles to stay on top.  

Only our enlightenment experiment broke away from this pattern and found another, in which equalization of opportunity, plus rights and transparency and love of science, opened up all the positive sum games that utilize competition -- markets, democracy, science, justice courts and sports.  The resulting cornucopia has been dazzling!  But humans who rise up high will always be tempted by urges to shut down competition and become lords.

That is the grand context.  Our current struggles may matter even on a galactic scale!  If we are the first to rise up to Star Trek levels of enlightened maturity, then we could rescue all the others, out there, trapped in cycles of feudalism.

Oh but let's get back to Earth. Literally.

== Climate denialism is a symptom ==

Did I say feudalists suppress science? We've reached the point where denialists are frantic. Having invested in raging contempt for science and scientific civilization, while claiming the opposite, they must now double down -- trying desperately to prevent cognitive dissonance. They must avoid doing that almost-impossible thing for human beings... but the act that science teaches.  

To admit: "maybe I was wrong."

I could link to sage articles and scientific studies till the sun burns out and they would have no effect. Cultists will answer with nostrums and "talking points" concocted by Koch-financed shills who could not parse the gas vapor laws if their lives depended on it. But jpegs re sometimes convincing. Here are four images that make the point fiercely.

First the rate at which humans have been adding CO2 to the atmosphere of a world that skates the inner edge of our sun's continuously habitable zone. And that's a crucial aspect!  Because it answers the cultist line: "How could measly humans affect habitability of a giant planet?"

Let me reiterate: our Earth skates the very inner edge of our sun's continuously habitable zone. Because of that, our world must have a very transparent atmosphere with a Gaia Balance that has only just enough CO2 for plants to live.  Needing to allow heat to escape, we can afford very little greenhouse gas. 

Indeed, some time soon (less than 100M years) we will have to move the Earth!)

But saying "humans can't change an atmosphere" can easily be measured.  That is: if we're allowed to!  The Bushites sabotaged satellites and hampered scientists, but the Trumpists have taken things to a whole new level, cancelling programs and ordering NASA to never look down at a planet called Earth.  

You denialists who have long proclaimed "the jury is still out!  We need more data!" are now exposed as hypocrites. The truth is the very last thing you want.

But none of this is as horrifically dishonest as the standard riff used by Ten Cruz and other fanatics, claiming "there's been no net warming for 5 years!" Then 6 years. Then it was 7! Always increasing by one.  

Why so specific?  Look at our third jpeg and note the spike in 1998. The general slope of temperature has increased relentlessly, but fools and liars used that spike as a "before" to claim subsequent years were 'decreases.'  That is, till new peaks came in 2014... and 2015... and so far 2016, with all but one of the last seven months breaking records. Oh, so much to be proud of.

But the kicker is the ocean. Not one of the cult's shill "think tanks" has been able to concoct an incantation to answer the damage we are doing via ocean acidification. There are no even hypothetical causes for the effect that is killing coral and replacing fish with jellies, in all the regions depicted in our third jpeg, as well as helping to eutrophy (choke) the Black Sea and Mediterranean and Caribbean.

So what can we conclude?

Nothing new.  I made this list to arm you with talking points, because all that America needs to do, in order to win this phase of our recurring Civil War is to just peel off just 10 million still somewhat sane and reluctant and uncomfortable members of this weird-confederate coalition.  

     

You can do your part by hammering one, just one nervous aunt out there. (Your uncle is probably hopeless. Unless he's ex military; stay tuned for ammo that will work with him!)

Peel away one, then another. It's your assignment. Start with ocean acidification. I mean it. They cannot run from it or explain it, and Fox doesn't even try. They shout "squirrel!" and point offstage.  But use it, over and over again...  ocean acidification. ocean acidification.ocean acidification.

How Cheating Spoils Capitalism: the true roots of skyrocketing inequality

== What causes wealth disparity to skyrocket? ==

In a cogent analysis, Brookings fellow Jonathan Rothwell appraises varied explanations for why the top 0.01% have taken in such gushers of wealth in recent years. “Three of the standard explanations—capital shares, skills, and technology—are myths. 

"The real cause of elite inequality is the lack of open access and market competition in elite investment and labor markets. To bring the elite down to size, we need to make them compete.”

This has been my own relentless theme.  The rationalizers of rapacious versions of capitalism claim to be promoting Adam Smith’s competitive markets – while doing everything in their power to demolish any chance those markets will be flat-open-fair-creative, or even Hayekian. 

Unintentionally, they are proving Smith right, who denounced conniving oligarchy as the great enemy of creative markets across all recorded history.

Were they sincere, instead of conspiratorial-rentier cheaters, they would know that their own lavish-gusher incomes should – by capitalist theory – attract talent from every other human field, until the price of financial talent would stop rising and actually go down! Supply and demand, it's called. Elsewhere I show how they explain why this never happens … that they are uber-lord-mutant-great managers! Immune to supply and demand, like basketball stars. 

Only the analogy shatters! NBA players are subject to utter scrutiny by relentless, objective metrics -- points, rebounds, assists per game and all that. In contrast, the CEO caste of 5000 golf buddies appoints each other onto their boards aiming to obscure measures of company health, concocting excuses for why a declining balance sheet or fading product line should be rewarded with higher compensation. They bandy reasons why stock buy-backs that eat a company's seed corn are better than investing in new products or services.

Rothwell’s appraisal is cogent and clear. “There is no evidence to support the idea that the top 0.01 percent consists mostly of people of “exceptional talent.” In fact, there is quite a bit of evidence to the contrary.”  

No, it is strictly and purely a matter of which industry you are in. Aside from the quasi-monopolistic mining and utilities sectors, just being in finance gives you a huge – i.e. parasitical – income multiplier, no matter what the actual outcomes of your work. The financial caste is not facing competition.

 Moreover, tellingly, Rothwell rejects calling this a matter of Left or Right. “The modern left still too often sees the world through a Marxist lens of capitalist owners trying to exploit people who sell their labor for a living. But that doesn’t help explain rising top incomes. On the other hand, many on the modern right wrongly infer that great earnings must only be generated by great people.

“Before Marx, Adam Smith provided a framework for political economy that is especially useful today. Smith warned against local trade associations which were inevitably conspiring “against the public…to raise prices,” and “restraining the competition in some employments to a smaller number than would otherwise…occasion a very important inequality” between occupations.”

== It grows even clearer ==

In Left and Right Share a Common Enemy: Capitalists Who Corrupt Capitalism, perhaps the best and most important essay yet to be posted on the fast-rising Evonomics site, Professor Lawrence Lessig nails so many powerful points about how desperately capitalism needs to be saved from capitalists. 

Lessig, you may recall, briefly ran for president under a single-issue campaign to get the corrupting tsunamis of Big Money out of U.S. politics.  It think he would have made a better - far more modern-with-it - version of Bernie Sanders. (Though Bernie is almost a pure clone of my own dad.) On this occasion Lessig cogently lays down what’s at stake, showing how market economics is not the enemy of justice.  

Rather, our flat-open-fair-creative markets are the top victims of an ongoing attempted oligarchic putsch. 

Indeed, as Larry clearly shows, the all-too human contradictions that lead so many market winners to then cheat and shut down markets, was recognized and called out by the “founder” of modern enterprise capitalism.

Some of us have been urging for way more than a decade that Adam Smith be rediscovered as an archetype and founder — not just of fads like ”neo-liberalism,” but of the much broader notion that we call Liberalism, itself. The Evonomics site now invokes Smith in almost every-other article and I have hopes that this rediscovery movement will overflow into the nation's bitter discourse, as well.

== The rationale of Supply Side or 'trickle down' ==

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobelist in Economics, explains how Supply Side (SS) economic theory - darling of the American right, despite never once sustaining a successful, major prediction -- seemed so alluring, for so long:

"The reason why these ideas justifying inequality have endured is that they have a grain of truth in them. Some of those who have made large amounts of money have contributed greatly to our society, and in some cases what they have appropriated for themselves is but a fraction of what they have contributed to society. 

"But this is only a part of the story: there are other possible causes of inequality. Disparity can result from exploitation, discrimination and exercise of monopoly power. Moreover, in general, inequality is heavily influenced by many institutional and political factors— industrial relations, labour market institutions, welfare and tax systems, for example— which can both work independently of productivity and affect productivity."

Stiglitz explains how legislation that funneled vast advantages into the upper castes was not only the core reason for the American Revolution (and not 'tea party' rage at taxes), but also how Adam Smith denounced the anti- market effects of "rent seeking." 

He adds -- "rent-seeking means getting an income not as a reward for creating wealth but by grabbing a larger share of the wealth that would have been produced anyway. Indeed, rent-seekers typically destroy wealth, as a by-product of their taking away from others. A monopolist who overcharges for her or his product takes money from those whom she or he is overcharging and at the same time destroys value. To get her or his monopoly price, she or he has to restrict production."

Someone explain how that is flat-fair-competitive capitalism, instead of its opposite. Seriously, after reading Lessig, dive into this wise detailed, and definitive Stiglitz article. For more, see Stiglitz's book, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future.

== The guru of the intelligent right ==

Not only Adam Smith, but Friedrich Hayek, too, can be rediscovered and re-interpreted. While it's true that Hayek despised government-socialist intervention, the reason for his skepticism toward government meddling was actually quite cogent: when too many decisions are made by bureaucrats you reduce economic wisdom by limiting the number of economic players and choosers. 

A fair point, though with complexities the Right chooses to ignore. For example, if 100,000 diverse, accountable and transparent civil servants cannot "allocate" well because they are too few, then isn't the problem even worse when allocation is done by an incestuous, conniving, secretive cabal of only 5,000 CEO-caste golf buddies? Connivers who sully Hayek's name, whenever they mention him?

Which leads us to the Bigger Picture... the one aspect that Lessig, Stiglitz, and apparently everyone else leave out is the great context of large scale history. 

For 6000 years, wherever humans got metals and agriculture, the typical social pattern was a pyramid of inherited hierarchy, loosely called feudalism.  Big men with swords found it appealing to arrange that they would get no competition from those below, and that their sons would inherit ownership of other folk's sons and daughters. 

The pattern, replicated everywhere, reinforced by darwinian reproductive advantage.  And it boiled down to a single, simple word that anyone would understand -- cheating.  Using your high status advantages -- e.g. swords or armies of lobbyists -- to crush any potential competitors from below. The temptation will always be there.

Our brief, 240 year miracle - dating not just from the Declaration of Independence but also the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations - has been based upon dividing power so that cheating can be limited by competitive accountability. By opponents pointing out and staunching cheats before they get so large that they become self-reinforcing. 

One result has been the world's first Diamond-shaped society, with an empowered middle class that fizzes forth new competitors at rates that should please Smith or Hayek and that delivers real goods. Alas, a diamond is unstable and last year's winners will try to prevent new competition, so they can become next year's lords.

Our parents in the Greatest Generation knew this better than we do, because - like all their ancestors - they knew what class war was. Desperately, with help of fellows like FDR - they sought a solution other than the one most widely offered at the time, Marxian revolution.... choosing instead to empower the working class and flat-fair-creative competition, their Rooseveltean reset was so successful that we boomers grew up imagining “class war” to be quaint, obsolete, a worry to prioritize far below other long-neglected injustices like racism or sexism. 

But human nature hasn't changed and today's wealth disparities are nearing 1930s levels. Some claim the levels of 1789 France. An oligarchic putsch is underway, and Lessig's clarion calls are vital, if we are to perform another moderate, reasonable "reset" that saves and enhances and renews both capitalism and freedom. It will be either that or "tumbrels," which is why all the smart billionaires today - who can look beyond their noses - are democrats.

Larry Lessig's Evonomics missive makes this all very clear (except the history-feudalism part.)  Lessig explores these issues more thoroughly in his book Republic Lost: The Corruption of Equality and the Steps to End It. His quotations are vivid ammo, so copy and use a lot of them! 

But let me add one more, from Will and Ariel Durant's classic The Lessons of History:

“In progressive societies the concentration[of wealth] may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.”

== Why conservative revisionists should give a Hayek ==

Aw heck. Add one more brilliant mind to this mix. David Sloan Wilson, one of the driving forces behind the dynamic and insightful Evonomics site, has been part of the movement to rediscover and revive interest in Adam Smith, one of the chief founders of the modern enlightenment western experiment. 

Wilson has also called for a rediscovery of another complex thinker who was way-oversimplified by the American right: Friedrich Hayek. Yes, he was more explicitly anti-government  than Smith’s anti-oligarchy. Still, he evolved over time. As Wilson puts it:  “not a single prediction made in The Road to Serfdom materialized and Hayek himself modified his own views." 

Even in The Road to Serfdom Hayek wrote: “Nor is the preservation of competition incompatible with an extensive system of social services—so long as the organization of these services is not designed in such a way as to make competition ineffective over wide fields.”